Experts in the News

Scientists have long argued that familiar, beloved music — which is considered predictable and safe — can help enhance our focus and learning. According to two new studies led by Yiren Ren, a PhD student in the School of Psychology, different types of music can do more than just aid concentration; they can also influence our emotions and even reshape old memories.

Ren's faculty advisor and co-author, Associate Professor Thackery Brown, says the studies approach the impact of music from different angles. “One paper looks at how music changes the quality of your memory when you’re first forming it — it’s about learning,” says Brown. “But the other study focuses on memories we already have and asks if we can change the emotions attached to them using music.”

Brown is also a cognitive neuroscientist who runs the Memory, Affect, and Planning (MAP) Lab at Georgia Tech.

Related coverage: MedicalXpress, MSN,  New Atlas, Microsoft Start, Futurity, CNN Brasil, Huffpost, and The Good Man Project

The North Atlantic Ocean has had surface temperatures at or near record highs for months, but cooling along the equator in both the Atlantic and eastern Pacific may finally start to bring some relief, particularly for vulnerable coral reef ecosystems.

Professor and associate chair in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Annalisa Bracco, and Senior Academic Professional Zachary Handlos, in an article published in the The Conversation, discuss their research in two climate phenomena with similar names: La Niña, which forms in the tropical Pacific, and the less well-known Atlantic Niña, both of which are responsible for the cooling effect. Both can affect this year's hurricane season. 

(This research also appeared in Deccan Herald) 

Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics including fifth-year PhD student Mengqi Huang and Assistant Professor Chunhui Rita Du are among the authors of a paper recently published in Nature Physics. Researchers from six universities and Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed that strong quantum fluctuations can stabilize an unconventional magnetic phase after destroying a more conventional one.

Georgia Tech researchers led by Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, a professor in the School of Earth of Atmospheric Sciences have finished investigating how the prehistoric weakening of a major ocean current led to a decline in ocean nutrients and negative impacts on North Atlantic ocean life. The results support predictions about how our oceans might react to a changing climate — and what that means for ocean life.

“The research tests a concept that has previously only been explored in theory and models,” says lead author Lynch-Stieglitz. “The large-scale Atlantic overturning circulation provides the nutrients that underly biological productivity in the North Atlantic.”

(This research also appeared in List23.)

As great minds throughout history have aptly demonstrated, high IQ's aren't always compatible with 'normality.' Several experts, including School of Psychology Professor Eric Schumacher are quoted in an article about seven behaviors that are linked to having a higher IQ. Schumacher's study on daydreaming, completed in 2017 with Christine Godwin, is referenced. "People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering," Schumacher says. "Our findings remind me of the absent-minded professor — someone who's brilliant, but off in his or her own world, sometimes oblivious to their own surroundings, or school children who are too intellectually advanced for their classes. While it may take five minutes for their friends to learn something new, they figure it out in a minute, then check out and start daydreaming," he adds. 

In June 2024, several earthquakes shook the northeast corner of Metro Atlanta, including the Buford and Lake Lanier regions of Gwinnett and Hall counties. In a radio interview with 95.5 WSB, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Zhigang Peng discusses a theory regarding water levels and earthquakes. "It turns out a reservoir is well known to cause earthquakes," Peng says. "Now, probably not at Lake Lanier, I have not heard anything related to this reservoir -- but looking at the broader regions, we have quite a few reservoirs in Georgia and the southern regions. Some of them are known to trigger or cause earthquakes.” 

https://bit.ly/3yAzasN

An article published in Phys.org reveals a new sustainable reaction for creating unique molecular building blocks. According to the published study, researchers from Georgia Tech’s Gutekunst Lab collaborated with Scripps Research and the University of Pittsburg to test whether newly invented nickel-catalyzed chemical reactions designed to build a diverse array of small molecule monomers could be scaled up to create unique polymers for drug delivery, energy storage, microelectronics, and more.

No one knows yet how much water the Moon has or how deep it goes. But one thing is certain: There’s much more than scientists first thought. In a series created for children of all ages called, "Curious Kids," and published in The Conversation, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernandez, and School of Aerospace Engineering Professor Glenn Lightsey discuss how scientists confirmed there is water on the moon and the careful steps we must take to access it.

Rising land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet could slow ice loss and reduce sea-level rise in coming centuries. However, if emissions continue to rise, the effect could raise sea levels even more than the melting ice alone. 

Associate Professor Alexander Robel with the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences comments on a study recently published in ScienceAdvances that models the relationship between melting ice and rebounding land under different emission scenarios. He says the scenario where rebounding land increases sea level rise is based on worst-case assumptions about emissions as well as the rate at which the ice sheet retreats. 

Scientists have produced an image of the Milky Way not based on electromagnetic radiation - light - but on ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface, then traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way - the first time these particles have been observed arising from our galaxy.

The neutrinos were detected over a span of a decade at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at a U.S. scientific research station at the South Pole, using more than 5,000 sensors covering an area the size of a small mountain.

School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada is the spokesperson for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and provides a brief commentary on this new research:

"This observation is ground-breaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation," says Taboada.

A team of Georgia Tech researchers from the lab of Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev in the School of Psychology has made a groundbreaking advancement in artificial intelligence by developing a neural network that emulates human decision-making. This innovation could transform AI systems, making them more reliable and accurate. In their study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers from Rahnev’s lab, introduced RTNet, a neural network designed to match human decision-making patterns.

(This research also appeared in The Debrief).

Georgia Tech researchers developed a neural network, RTNet, that mimics human decision-making processes, including confidence and variability, improving its reliability and accuracy in tasks like digit recognition. Working in the lab of Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev in the School of Psychology, researchers are training neural networks to make decisions more like humans. This science of human decision-making is only just being applied to machine learning, but developing a neural network even closer to the actual human brain may make it more reliable.